Epigenetics and the generational effects of the Great Hunger
Exploring the research on epigenetics and how it may explain the inter-generational impact of the Great Famine
I am currently working on the final edits of a book (a short one), called “Threatening Women: A cultural history of why Ireland shamed and contained women”, which I hope to release soon. As the spare time I usually give to researching and writing this Substack newsletter is being ploughed into that endeavour at the moment, this week, I am sharing something from the Archive rather than any new writing.
Some of you may have read it before but I imagine many, especially new subscribers (Hi!) will not. It’s a piece I wrote over a year ago now, about the generational effects of the Great Famine, distilling months of research. I think, in Ireland, we are only beginning to catch up with how the Famine shaped us and a regular revisiting of its generational effects can, I feel, go someway in helping to transmute them. This is my best offering in that regard.
Grá mór,
Belinda
“The Famine scarred Ireland’s psychological landscape as deeply as depopulation altered the physical terrain. Devastating communities, leaving family homes as gaunt ruins, the Famine both domesticated the otherness of hunger and wrought a radical defamiliarisation. Apocalyptically transforming history, the Famine seems to arrest all possibility of meaning and to resist notions of retrieval and restitution. An event that continues to challenge articulation and whose presiding motif is a silent, empty mouth, it has nonetheless continued, insistently and uncomfortably, to generate narratives within and beyond modern Ireland. Symptomatically wavering between silence and speech, forgetting and remembering, the Famine exemplifies history as trauma”.
Scott Brewster and Virginia Crossman
These words by Brewster and Crossman are words I return to often. They’re the only written words I’ve found, in my reading of the Great Hunger (The Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1852) that pull at something in me and come somewhat close to describing the level and extent to which its effects continue to reverberate —mostly unseen and unuttered— through the bodies of ‘people of Ireland’.
These last few weeks, either by chance, synchronicity or the controlling influence of the social media algorithm, I’ve found myself reading several online discussions about the intergenerational impacts and traumas of the Great Hunger (it seems to be gaining traction?). This sparked some offline discussions and sent me on a research deep-dive into intergenerational trauma and epigenetics.
Most of us ‘of Ireland’ know the Famine did something. We know it changed something deeply; we know we still live with and within those changes, that we live in the wake of a destruction of wholeness (the wholeness of a person) but we don’t know what the change was exactly. We just know something (many some-things) is lost, damaged, warped, altered, or buried? And that no matter how much it “continues to challenge articulation” it is not silent. It screams to be heard, known, and named, in the repeated dis-ease it has caused across generations in its desire to be healed.
Irish people “have not healed from these repressed horrors; it is as if unmarked Famine graves are in each of us”.
Tom Hayden
(Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine)
Women I’ve interviewed talk of it, feeling it in what they describe as an inexplainable hunger and a sense of anxiety when they don’t have food to hand. Others tell of ancestral patterns of pain and repression and their connection to addiction and mental health challenges within their wider families.
“I've done an awful lot of ancestral healing… There's been a lot of things that have been triggered, and whenever I've gone under — it's not really hypnosis as such, it's more of on a soul level, connecting with things in that we're all connected and [have] shared experiences— something will always come up. And that might not be your experience, but it's an experience of somebody in your ancestral line [and it’s] that their thing needs [to be] healed. And I think that that hunger that I felt as a child, I have no doubt that that is really into a Famine thing”.
(Women of Ireland Project Participant)
An ‘apocalyptic transforming’ of history reverberates beyond history. Into the present. How can it not?
Science, through the field of epigenetic research, is perhaps only beginning to catch up with what our bodies have long told us; that the experiences of our ancestors affect us too.
Epigenetics: a way to understand the lasting generational effects of the Great Hunger?
Epigenetics is the study of how environment and behaviours change the way genes work. The DNA sequence does not change, gene expression — the way the body reads DNA — changes. In other words, epigenetic changes are not permanent, they are changes that occur in response to signals from the enviornment. And it’s these changes to a how a DNA sequence is read that can be passed on to subsequent generations.
In many ways, it’s a remarkably clever system of the human body; it gives it the flexibility to continuously adapt and adjust its gene expression to suit the needs of the environment. And importantly, it gives it the ability to pass those adjustments on to any offspring, so they are primed and ready for the environment they will be born into.
What happens, though, if the environment your genes have adjusted to is one of several years of intense horror, constant fear, little hope, hunger and starvation, loss of home and community and the complete breakdown of society and culture as you knew it?
“The psychological and physiological trauma of the Great Famine fundamentally altered health profiles in Ireland, leaving a mark upon survivors and their descendants that continued well into the 20th century. Both at home and as part of the diaspora worldwide, the Irish exhibited an unusual health profile (especially in relation to mental illness) that suggests impact on a communal rather than individual level, and impact that, moreover, was transgenerational. This, combined with the unsettled social, political and economic circumstances of 19th century Ireland, may have led to higher levels of general stress in the population, and may go some way toward explaining our unique relationship with mental and physical ill health”
Oonagh Walsh
“An invisible but inescapable trauma”: epigenetics and the Great Famine
Ireland is often described as having a unique mental health profile. ‘Unique’ is code for the immensely disproportionate number of the population who were committed to ‘mental asylums’ from the latter half of the 19th century (post-Famine years) and well into the 20th century. So many that Ireland has, at various points in the history of such institutions, had the highest numbers of ‘psychiatric beds’ (per 1,000 of the population) in the world1.
Intuitively and logically, many of us can see how those years of intense horror (i.e. The Great Hunger) may be a reason for this unique mental health profile — admissions to mental asylums in post-Famine Ireland were rising rapidly and disproportionately as the population was halving!
But it’s complex. High rates of mental illness alone don’t explain the intensely high rates of people being institutionalised in asylums in post-Famine Ireland2.
Ireland has a bit of political, social and cultural proclivity for institutionalisation — we deal with ‘difficult’ people the same way we deal with difficult feelings; we hide them away. People (especially women) who just didn’t conform to the norm were often labelled ‘mad’ and committed by relatives, their only observable ‘illness’ being they did something considered deviant. (Asylum records from just one ‘insane asylum’ in Co. Wexford in the early 20th century revealed women were being committed for as little as ‘trying to get away from the home’, not getting on with their in-laws, and from intense distress due to being gossiped and shamed by neighbours for ‘going with men’ or having a baby outside of marriage3).
The reliance on institutionalisation is also a sad fact of a breakdown in community and familial support systems (which is arguably a social impact of the Great Hunger) — many people entered asylums because they had no one to care for them, or life inside them was better than life outside. But perhaps the most heart-breaking reason for an increase in asylum admittances post-Famine is the ‘Gone to America’ letter; people who needed to emigrate used them as places to leave behind vulnerable family members4.
Basically, there are so many complex socio-cultural and socio-economic reasons for why so many people were being committed to asylums in post-Famine Ireland that a Famine-related increase in mental illness alone does not explain it. (And this is without even mentioning the fact that the years after the Famine also happen to coincide with a time-period when such institutions were being created and increasingly built, as part of a general Victorian attitude to social issues and mental health, creating a system of institutionalisation that had never existed before).
That being said, studies of Irish emmigrants to Britain, Canada and Australia have found that Irish people, compared to other migrant groups, are ‘disproportionately over-represented’ amongst those admitted to asylums in each country.
While experiencing and living through the Great Hunger is not the singular and only reason for an increase in mental illness-related institutionalisation amongst Irish people, there is a link between the two, and that link becomes even clearer in the descendants of Famine survivors. It’s a link born from the clever way the body adjusts its genetic expression to the environment and passes it on to prime offspring from birth.
Epigenetic studies from the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945 reveal that children who were in utero during this period of Famine were born primed and ready for lack. An epigenetic change had equipped people gestated during this period with a ‘thriftyness’ that could see them through times of hunger, but also meant they were detrimentally unsuited to environments of excess (i.e. modern living). The epigenetic change which meant they were born primed to survive has also meant this cohort is more predisposed to type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and hypertension now that food is no longer scarce5.
But the effects of epigenetic change during times of Famine and intense distress don’t just stop at the physical. A further finding of the Dutch Hunger Winter research is that being gestated during times of famine can increase the risk of presenting with schizophrenia in later life:
“Early prenatal famine was found to be specifically and robustly associated with each of three conditions: (1) congenital anomalies of the central nervous system, (2) schizophrenia, and (3) schizophrenia spectrum personality disorders”6.
Schizophrenia is a particularly significant component of Ireland’s mental illness and related institutional story and profile. For much of the 20th century it was widely believed that Ireland, particularly the West of Ireland, had some of the highest (if not the highest) rates of hospitalised mental illness in the world and schizophrenia was the primary diagnosis given to those admitted7.
This led to a view that schizophrenia was more prevalent amongst the Irish than any other nationality. However, many have questioned this, finding that much of the data and reporting mechanisms which support this view are flawed and ambiguous8 and that the numbers have been overestimated9.
But if you don’t get caught up in the numbers and the raging debates about how high is high and are Ireland’s rates really that much higher than other countries (?) the fact remains that many, many, many people of Ireland, both at home and abroad, in the century following the Great Hunger were admitted to ‘mental institutions’ with apparent schizophrenia.
Based on admission rates in the post-Famine years in areas most detrimentally affected by the Great Hunger, Brendan Kelly of Trinity College Dublin feels that:
“It is reasonable to tentatively conclude that (a) there is a scientific rationale to support the idea of increased rates of mental illness among those who were in gestation or born during the Famine or shortly afterwards, and (b) there is evidence of increased admission rates in this cohort when they reached the age at which the illness now known as ‘schizophrenia’ most commonly develops. These facts raise at least the possibility, if not the probability, that famine conditions had a deleterious effect on the developing brains of these babies and children”10.
If the relatively short Dutch Winter Famine of 1944-45 caused epigenetic changes which increased the likelihood that people in utero during that time would present with schizophrenia in later life, then what did nearly six years of hunger (and the associated disease and despair) do to people in Ireland?
The associations between famine and schizophrenia have been linked to nutritional deprivation — an adjacent mental health impact of the epigenetic priming for ‘thriftiness’. But epigenetic change can do more than prime offspring to survive off little food, it can also prime you for stress.
Various studies both non-human (looking at how traumatic events alter the relationship between mother rats and their offspring) and human (i.e. children of Holocaust survivors, and children of women who were pregnant during, and affected by, the 9/11 Twin Tower attacks) have indicated that the experience of traumatic events can cause epigenetic changes which, in response to the severity of the environment, prime the body for stress. While this helps with resilience in times of stress, this epigenetic change means that those who inherit this form of gene expression are less well adapted to ‘normal’, less threatening environments. Consequently, with their bodies primed for danger and stress, they are more likely to suffer from, for example, PTSD in response to traumatic events than individuals not born with the gene expression ‘primed for stress’11.
In other words, it’s possible that those who survived the Great Hunger and were exposed to the severity of its stress and trauma passed on to their children a sort of ‘hyper-vigilant’ environmental adaptation. It was an alteration to gene expression that had probably helped them to survive, but it simultaneously meant subsequent generations were set up to experience more severe mental health outcomes in response to less severe shocks, because their bodies were primed and set up to continue to read them as severe.
As Oonagh Walsh, one of the few who has started to bring the study of epigenetics to bear on the generational effects of the Great Hunger, explains it:
“The Great Famine changed Irish society forever, altering social, political, economic and religious life…. [it arguably also] changed our basic biological makeup, laying down a specific mental and physical health profile in order to prepare whole communities for further famine and stress”12.
In post-Famine Ireland then, you could say we are primed for famine and stress, and our epigenetic adaptations —the ones that mean many of us are biologically ‘thrifty’ and mentally resilient in the face of intense adversity— have not yet adjusted to (the relatively speaking) safe environment we find ourselves in now. Consequently, our bodies (the whole body) continue to express themselves through and with the epigenetic inheritance of our ancestors; and its an epigenetic inheritance shaped by trauma.
But, genetically speaking, it’s an inheritance that is not inevitable — how our DNA sequences are expressed can change. That’s the wondrous beauty of our incredibly adaptable bodies.
Walsh, D., Daly, A., & Moran, R. (2016). The institutional response to mental disorder in Ireland: Censuses of Irish asylums, psychiatric hospitals and units 1844–2014. Irish Journal of Medical Science (1971 -), 185(3), 761–768. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11845-015-1368-4
Kelly, B. D. (2019). The Great Irish Famine (1845–52) and the Irish asylum system: Remembering, forgetting, and remembering again. Irish Journal of Medical Science (1971 -), 188(3), 953–958. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11845-019-01967-z
McCarthy, Á. (2001). Hearths, Bodies and Minds: Gender Ideology and Women’s Committal to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum, 1916 – 1925. In A. Hayes & D. Urquhart (Eds.), The Irish Women’s History Reader. Routledge.
Walsh, O. (2016). ‘An invisible but inescapable trauma’: Epigenetics and the Great Famine. In C. Kinealy, J. F. King, & C. Reilly (Eds.), Women and the Great Hunger. Quinnipiac University Press.
ibid.
Hoek, H. W., Brown, A. S., & Susser, E. (1998). The Dutch famine and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 33(8), 373–379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s001270050068
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2000). Ire in Ireland. Ethnography’s Kitchen, 1(1), 117–140.
Cabot, M. R. (1990). The incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia in the Republic of Ireland. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 25(4), 210–215. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00782963
Nuallain, M., O'Hare, A., & Walsh, D. (1987). Incidence of schizophrenia in Ireland. Psychological Medicine, 17(4), 943-948. doi:10.1017/S0033291700000751
Kelly, B. D. (2019). The Great Irish Famine (1845–52) and the Irish asylum system: Remembering, forgetting, and remembering again. Irish Journal of Medical Science (1971 -), 188(3), 953–958. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11845-019-01967-z
Walsh, O. (2016). ‘An invisible but inescapable trauma’: Epigenetics and the Great Famine. In C. Kinealy, J. F. King, & C. Reilly (Eds.), Women and the Great Hunger. Quinnipiac University Press.
ibid.
I found this so helpful. For a long time I've been doing shamanic healing work on the famine both with clients and myself.
I had anorexia nervosa as a teenager in response to tragedy in my family. There's also a history of alcoholism and diabetes among us which I knew was famine related but it never occurred to me that the control issues involved with anorexia could be related too. So fascinating, and heartbreaking as well.
Thank you so much for this.
This. All of this.